


Listen

by great-pan-is-dead (TheCrimsonDream)



Category: Vampire Chronicles - All Media Types, Vampire Chronicles - Anne Rice
Genre: Death, Flowers, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Guilt, Headcanon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-07-31
Updated: 2016-07-31
Packaged: 2018-07-28 10:03:56
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 377
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7635994
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheCrimsonDream/pseuds/great-pan-is-dead
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Still in guilt for the lives he has to take, Louis tries to tell them in his own way, but to no avail.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Listen

**Author's Note:**

  * For [honey-in-the-sunshine](https://archiveofourown.org/gifts?recipient=honey-in-the-sunshine).



> Louis POV  
> IWTV era

  I tried to warn you, _monsieur, madame, petit enfant._ I truly did.    
  White flowers stitched into this black, _crysanthèmes,_ of which I am the bringer. I write death all over me, _I am the giver._ This is the only sentiment I keep for them, the lost.  
  I could not have told him. Oh, but he knew, didn’t he? I could see it in the way he laughed at me, the scathing glances as I slipped away on my own. He knew.  
  But they did not know.  
  It tried to warn you, in earnest.  
  Let me show you my mourning, my skin as white as them. Let me show you a funeral; your own, _my own._

  There was one. A quaint stranger, an Englishman, hair on his upper lip greying, who wore brocade of lemongrass. He was closing shutters of shop, he worked with greenery- it was on his hands. I could smell it. He saw my eyes as I wandered to him. Something in him knew.  
_“A man of grief.”_ his face said to me, and my face said to him. But _“The death of whom?”_ his eyes asked themselves as he paled, and then, a look into mine, and the glisten of sweat that formed- _“My own.”_  
  The terror of someone who knows what is to happen to them is very different to that of someone who has no conception of it. I dared part lips to show teeth, just to tell him he was right. Someone who had worked it out.  
  Ah, but they find us beautiful, don’t they? That is why he stayed. But acceptance of what was happening to him was what his blood told me. Acceptance, and strangest of all to me, forgiveness.  
  His dead eyes sparkled with a knowledge that it was Death who held him.  
  
  I tried to protect you, stay away. Stay away.  
  They think it means mourning- and it does. I mourn for the lives I’ll take, for my own that was taken.

  He led me away from it, but in those early years, it was all I could tell myself. The language of flowers as bitter materialism to me, poetry that was left in the turning of an age.    
  But there are still those who speak it.


End file.
